It could begin with an
eruption of wit, a sudden pun he puts together out of casual comments at the
dinner table. Listen: between morsels of Gerber’s, he is conjugating
irregular verbs. Soon he is doubling and tripling up on entendres
while his peers are still trying to chant the alphabet.

Or say his
doodles do more than merely endear him to those who would love him
regardless. His pals play with finger paints just for the fun of gooshing;
meanwhile, without prompting, he’s producing post-Impressionist knockoffs.
While Nicky and Bobby are using their Tinker Toys to gouge the carpet or
harry the cat, he is giving Louis Sullivan a run for his money. Out of the
mundane timber of Lincoln Logs, he has a miniature Parthenon under way.

Perhaps the first sign of his election comes in daycare. When
the other infants squinch their faces, it just means they are filling their
diapers, but he is preparing to squeeze his first insight out. He picks up
chess the way the rest of them picked up colds. The teachers and aides at La
Petite Academy quickly single him out, or rather, they can’t help but notice
how he separates himself from the sticky pack. “He’ll be a grand master
before he’s ten,” says Miss Ashley. “He’ll give a concert at Carnegie Hall
before any of the rest of them can play a measure,” says Miss Julia. “It’ll
be close whether he’ll get his Ph.D. in physics or reach puberty first,”
says Miss Karinne. These women always idle at “nice,” but for once they are
not just being nice. “They’ll have to hoist him onto the stage to accept his
diploma,” they agree.

Prodigies come to a
rolling boil in their cribs. As young as three, they are urged to perform in
front of company. Because they startle even their own doting parents, their
fathers set them out with the hors d’oeuvres to astound the company. Their
mothers beg them to wait until the video recorders are ready. Just listen to
them read! Only three, and they handle complex sentences as readily most
kids their age do Legos. Or have them do math. They can add any pair of
double digits in their heads, and they can already multiply through the
nines. Or how about capitals? They don’t miss one in fifty. They don’t
confuse North and South Dakota or mix the Virginias, ever. They’ve memorized
all the songs from Oliver! and sing all the parts, with all of the
proper histrionics and the accents intact. They spell like champs, and I
don’t mean “dog” and “cat,” either. I’m talking “ancient.” I’m talking
“celery.” I’m talking “carburetor” and “ridiculous.” Go ahead, honeys. We’re
all waiting.

And every
prematurely endowed one of them toddles up and does so, smoothly and
dutifully, pitch perfect and error free, solves the equations, recites
Shakespeare, impersonates Jimmy Stewart, stretches the species. Urging does
not trouble him. A crowd does not. He is destined to star at academic
contests, after all. His bedroom bulletin board will soon be strewn with
ribbons from science fairs; his bureau will be covered with trophies from
assorted mental Olympics.

In elementary school,
although the day’s allotment of nasal drip frosts his upper lip, he ticks
off the Periodic Table of the Elements. He cracks crossword puzzles before
he’s cut a third of his adult teeth. He wades into set theory while the rest
of his age group is still stuck on Dr. Seuss. With pudgy fingers he beetles
flawlessly over the piano keys—he also plays a mean miniature viola and a
tiny violin—and in doing so proves that Mozart is a child’s game after all.
Whatever his specialty, he always awes the guests, in spite of the fact that
when he goes to sleep he still wants the light on and wets the bed. (Imagine
a brain instantly able to unearth square roots or to dismantle Latin but
unequipped to command the bladder.) But it is his capacities and not his
lapses that define him, that set him apart and compel us.

“He was a sage
baby,” his dumbfounded folks tell CNN. “Only a few birthdays in, he was
already figuring the family taxes!” It is a joke, but just barely. And it is
a nervous humor they turn to, knowing the statistics regarding the prolonged
childhood of prodigies. Dad may have to dress his boy until he is old enough
to vote. Mom may be cutting up his meat at his wedding rehearsal. Just like
parents who have children with disabilities, they have familiarized
themselves with the oddities and the odds. They are already girding
themselves for the prospect of longstanding dependency and deferral of their
plans to retire to Boca Raton. The way that their friends have studied the
hottest stocks, the prodigy’s parents have studied the vicissitudes of human
potential. At dinner parties, their friends show off their fluency in
foreign films or the National Football League; the prodigy’s parents can
tick off textbook cases by name.

And so the quizzed kid
ensues, flashing bits of aptitude that supersede anything that might have
been bequeathed through the genes, given the average status of Dad, the
mediocrity of Mom. And the reaction to him has always been unanimous and not
merely polite. For other friends’ children—for their own non-prodigies as
well—there is always a warm enough reception, for whom it is sufficient, to
win applause, that they not spill their Tippy Cups or probe their noses. But
this child was never meant for the sweet but limited achievements
appropriate to his age. He so obviously and early on flew past sufficiency
that he earns a place in their conversation even after he’s been excused to
return to his room.

Remarkable, that boy, and
frankly, rather unsettling, too, like something embryonic in a jar, which is
where Harvard would house him if they had their druthers. Maybe more
off-putting than enviable, when you get right down to it, on the order of a
potato shaped like the head of a president or a two-headed calf. The kid’s
too young for copyright law, and a circus, though appropriate, would be
cruel. If he continues to blossom at this rate, his head will have to hatch,
that is, if he doesn’t blow his bright little wad before puberty. (Not all
prodigies swell to grown-up prominence as reliably as they plumped inside
their mothers shortly before.) And can you imagine the tribulations that
await him at recess? Every generation finds playgrounds soaked with the
blood of Poindexters, who scrabbled blindly about after their routine
beatings to recover their snapped protractors and spilled calculus notes.
(Admittedly, there is the occasional exception of an Alexander, who
graduated to “the Great” while the rest of his class was still years away
from serious career planning. Even the most brazen bullies didn’t risk
tripping him.) It can’t be easy to lead an untimely life like that. They
will suffer for being so special.

Historically speaking,
prodigies were as likely to be treated as demons as they were to be honored
as prophets. We prize excellence, to be sure, but deviance to this degree is
always at least a little disagreeable whatever direction it takes. As David
Henry Feldman, a professor of developmental psychology, writes in
Nature’s Gambit, the prodigy phenomenon seems “to violate the natural
order of things,” and Feldman takes pains to point out that the etymology of
“prodigy” includes connotations of monstrosity. We may not banish or
abominate prodigies nowadays, but we haven’t exactly taken the targets off
their backs, either. Soloists remain fair game for clean shots; a more
comfortable fate can be had in the middle of the choir. An elevated I.Q.,
like an elevated white count, will upset the classroom and freak out the
parents—the stricken kid needs constant watching.

Remembering the
eight-hour-a-day practice sessions mandated by the early evidence of her
remarkable musical abilities, violinist Yeou-Cheng Ma confesses, “I traded
my childhood for my good left hand.” Ravenous for the violin before the age
of three, Nils Kirkendahl was already straining the expertise of teachers in
several conservatories in the Boston area by the time he was eight years
old. Watching the boy flog his talents forward, his composition teacher
reports that Nils is not only “fantastic” but “too good to be true. He has
no faults and that’s terrible, it’s frightening—marvelous, but frightening
because you just can’t believe that this is all going to happen.” That level
of brilliance and overdrive is quite a plight to wish on a kid, we tell
ourselves, more than a little relieved to see the occasional mistake on our
own children’s homework, grateful that their intensities can wane
sufficiently for them to get to sleep. Better to be my routine daughter, my
unexceptional son, and be able to bank on ordinary chances for happiness.

▼▪▲

Television has long been
drawn to prodigies, but television usually portrays them as merely
precocious. Frequently they are the youngest sons in sit-coms, whose
elevated syntax, unflappable manners, and penchant for dressing like
recently hired executives emphasize their distinction from mortal children,
not to mention from their reliably flummoxed fathers. If they are daughters,
they are pixie-cute with needle-keen vocabularies and lethal wit, but once
again it is at the expense of their flustered mothers or woebegone dads.
These are transparent caricatures, of course, tailored to the constraints of
the half-hour format. Rather than challenge the human perimeter in any
profound or permanent way, they end up as snuggly as the commonplace
children in the cast. Whatever intellectual antics they demonstrate are
designed to tweak a scene or two at most; they haven’t the substance to
carry a half-hour’s plot. Real life would obviously expose their flimsiness,
and at any credible school they’d never last out a single day’s abuse.

Occasionally, television
will feature real-life children, dangling their tiny shoes just over the
lips of their chairs, showing off their lisps, cowlicks, and gums like high
marks on their report cards. I especially remember how Art Linkletter’s
Kids Say the Darnedest Things enchanted viewers of all ages. Parents
enjoyed their inadvertent insights and uncensored sense of things; the
host’s avuncular, sidelong smile put the kids at ease and reminded the
adults in the audience that laughter, surprise, nostalgia, embarrassment,
and love were all acceptable responses—the host was open to any combination.
Homebound kids watched their televised counterparts as well, partly for the
Tom Sawyer-like satisfaction of seeing a grownup brought down, partly to
guarantee their distance from their primped and mincing example. Who knows
how many kids watched kids say the darnedest things just so they could damn
them? But aside from the odd Shirley Temple wannabe who actually had the
goods, Linkletter’s lot weren’t prodigies per se, only extroverts. Their
future was in class clowning and, later on, in sales.

When prodigies appear in
fiction, they either tend to struggle with or just plain regret their own
endowments, or they exasperate the rest of the family, who have to face the
glare of incipient genius day after day. J. D. Salinger’s Teddy, for
example, is so gnomic a little boy, so imperturbable a picture of
equanimity, that when he does make a mistake--on a family cruise, he
refers to the porthole as a “window”--his father carries on with mock
astonishment, gleeful as any junior high kid in detention who got to witness
his teacher trip over the wastebasket. Indeed, practically all of the Glass
siblings in Salinger’s stories descend from their eminence as radio stars
into disappointment, dissolution, or some other ruin.

The hero of Percival
Everett’s Glyph, an astoundingly erudite baby imbued with language
and literary theory, also consternates his father, a lesser
poststructuralist, with a flimsier grip on his wife’s devotion than the baby
has. Parents, psychiatrists, government agents, and would-be abductors are
at once astonished, threatened, and consumed by him, “And it all sat on me
like a weight, a kind of self-referential density,” he reports. “I was like
a loaded gun resting on a table in front of a bludgeon of convicts. And like
that gun, the fear seemed present in all the faces near me that I might at
any second go off, whatever going off might come to.” Similarly, in
Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, nine-year-old Eliza Naumann has lived
well beneath the radar as an indifferent student and has never had to bear
the burden of excellence her older brother does. But when she reveals a
championship-caliber talent for spelling, giddiness is tempered by dread.
Until now, mistakes were as normal and readily dismissed as grass stains on
her skirt; as she moves to higher levels of competition, however, she feels
defeat lurking in the auditorium, passing among the pre-adolescent
contestants like the Angel of Death. Nor does practice ease the pressure of
expectation upon her:

She dreams a sky
black with swarming letters. They fly with thick, stubby wings barely able
to hold their fat bodies aloft. They brush against her skin, nest in her
hair. They crawl up her nose, into her eyes. The ground is covered in torn
and broken letters that crunch beneath her feet with every step. The sound
of letters fills the air, making thought impossible. The letters squeeze
themselves between her lips and flutter their terrible wings inside her
mouth.

Rita Dove, whose father
drilled her with flash cards to keep her top-of-the-class edge, would have
understood Eliza’s nightmare: “the faster / I answered, the faster they
came,” she recalls, as if the cards assaulted her like malevolent birds.
Yes, Eliza Naumann and Rita Dove might have commiserated with one another,
were it not that elevation is so isolating.

Then there is
thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, with her
several idiosyncrasies: a gift for writing, a passion for plots and secrets,
a compulsion to control the older folks in the vicinity. “Was everyone else
really as alive as she was?” she wonders. “For example, did her sister
really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was
being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony?” The prospect of
being central and powerful, the fascination of real-life intrigue, and the
opportunity to truly author the destinies of adults tempt her to arrogance,
with tragic consequences for almost everyone else. “And though it horrified
her, it was another entry, a moment of coming into being, another first: to
be hated by an adult. . . . [T]o be the object of adult hatred was an
initiation into a solemn new world. It was promotion.” Everything is
magnified for the prodigy, disaster as well as opportunity, failure as well
as acclaim. Her ascent is more dramatic than most; so will be her fall.

▼▪▲

Most of us can
barely conceive of the brains we’re born with. If we think of what is doing
our thinking at all, we might conjure something akin to those misbegotten
embryos kept in jars for high school biology students to poke at and gag
over. A vague concoction vaguely concocting, which does its mulling with a
rubbery consistency that must give even seasoned neurologists pause.
Something of a color between raw liver and bad cabbage. Something hunched in
the skull like a hedgehog. I know that I am in the majority when I say that
any viable metaphor for the physical brain, from runny sponge to blood
pudding, puts me off my feed, as well as reminds me that I haven’t the
stomach for dissection. That it might be my own brain under inspection makes
my gorge, not my curiosity, rise.

Doubtless it’s more
natural to remain oblivious to the brain even when one is using it to brood
with. Honestly, who among us appreciates the huddled lobes, the occipital,
parietal, frontal, and prefrontal portions drawn in like linemen protecting
the pocket? Who has an inkling of the amygdala, wound like a friendship
bracelet worn in secret, or the medulla depending like a slice of inner
Illinois? What of the cingulate gyrus, which sounds like an animal grazing
on the Serengeti, or the mysterious activities of the wily hippocampus? Who
else but a surgeon bothers to comprehend the contours of our knowing? The
brain’s greasy sluices and hidden switches, the pitch and yaw of thought,
the sentience welling up, the humid mangle of it all. It’s an unfathomable
hemisphere altogether, when you come to think of it, and more than a little
gruesome, too. Then there is aging to face, with the prospect of one
cerebral neighborhood after another surrendering to blight until the whole
head’s disintegrated and uninhabitably dim. The strange relays growing
annually stranger, the precious current leaking, the axons atrophying and
dendrites drying out. Synapses once easily leaped yawning wider and wider.
Once-limpid thoughts limping dully along. Awful to contemplate while one
still can contemplate, futile to try to do so once the circuitry
fries. No, basically, the general population does not keep the mind in mind.

However, in the same way
that no one anatomized hitting so meticulously as Ted Williams did,
prodigies probably visit above-average interest upon their above-average
mentalities. Surely they are aware that certain times and places have proved
especially conducive to their kind. They know about a clot of juvenile
classical pianists performing in and around Prague, about a cache of chess
masters who disdained the playgrounds of St. Petersburg to work on their
boards, about a bumper crop of Berlin-area mathematicians who proved ripe
for renown while their playmates were still raw youths. Don’t they suspect
that these and not their run-of-the-mill siblings are their true kin?

Likewise, just as the
bodybuilder flexes intently, admiring the muscles that separate him from
those who sweat to far less benefit at the gym, so might the prodigy linger
on the gray matter in which his distinction is pitched. Surely it isn’t much
of a stretch to suppose him alone in the lab or sandbox colluding with his
own cranium, considering his intelligence brewing the way a witch in a fable
oversees the magic in her pot. All of us have muscles, but most don’t merit
reflection; by the same reasoning, all of us have brains, but given the
opportunity, it’s the prodigy’s brain you’d pick. For the prodigy himself
must be awed by his own accelerated metabolics, must in the midst of all he
ponders ponder how and why his mind is able to fix and tighten around a
problem when the minds of most kids, confronting difficulty, merely mush and
puddle. The ordinary child’s brain must be at best a frail government of a
developing nation; it comes awake fitfully, sluggishly, like a low-level
employee on a Monday morning or one of the fluorescent bulbs he’ll spend the
day under. But the brain of a prodigy, with the next fresh understanding
forever leaning on its doorbell, well, that bears watching. See the prodigy
iris in, hone his focus, lock down on his task like a raptor sizing up its
prey. Doctors, take out your notepads.

What analogy can
accommodate a prodigy’s thought processes? The prodigy himself might picture
a derrick under construction, manned by an ideal team of riggers. He might
think of ideas erected out of stainless girders, whose bolts hit their holes
exactly. Its corrugations are tailored to every specification; its
components are solidly machined. By contrast, my own pre-school thoughts
never came close to the tolerances “ideas” require to deserve the term;
“notions” was more like it, the sorts of things a boy might pick dripping
out of the marsh and not be allowed to bring into the house. While the
prodigy can apprehend a concept like a culprit, systematically stalking it,
cornering it, and dragging it cuffed into the light, when I was a child, I
spake as a child and surmised as one as well. My interior life was probably
as sloppy as the room I slept in, and so was pretty much every other kid’s.
But a prodigy’s mental landscape, tilled and fertile, its broad fields
crosshatched with corollaries, promises a ripe future and a regular return.

And yet, not long after
puberty, the erstwhile prodigies may very well stop producing. Experts
report that, more often than not, prodigies fail to remake their disciplines
in their own initial images. Ninety-nine out of a hundred prodigies do not
sustain their climb into the true artistry of the adult master, says Yuli
Turovsky, who conducts I Musici of Montreal and who has seen many young
musicians break down or burn out. “It can be devastating to realize that
you’ve done everything as a child and there are no more challenges for you
as an adult.” Indeed, there are fewer stories of their unchecked ascent than
there are of whiz kids wearing out: the human computer’s stunts stunted, the
child composer’s creativity decomposed, the mini-linguist’s perceptivity
dispelled. Some former prodigies handle the decline into normality well
enough; others are traumatized. They let their chemicals evaporate, their
rough drafts and canvases yellow, or their calculations stall in the
basements that had been remodeled to accommodate their respective gifts.
They abandon their chess sets to the spiders and dust. They dash their
treacherous instruments against the wall.

The descent of a prodigy
into the typical is as unpredictable as his creation was and potentially as
troubling in its repercussions. In the realm of sensational mental events,
he had always been a prince; we should not be surprised if he takes his
exile hard. For the first time he must envision a relentlessly credible
future, with his uniqueness tamped down into mere adequacy. He will have to
suffer the insult of finitude like the rest of us. Sensing his diminishment,
the prodigy might grow erratic, clinging desperately to the vestiges of his
distinction. Asked to organize his sock drawer, he might hypothesize the
structure of a new subatomic particle. Urged to finish his vegetables, he
might scratch out a sonata on his napkin. On his birthday, told by his
mother that she loves him, he might escape her squeeze to sketch out a map
of Africa; while she is finishing the decorations on his cake before the
party starts, he is anxiously dotting on the capitals and detailing the
crimps and fissures in the coasts.

In the end, the arc of
the prodigy’s career is inexplicable. Therefore, we should not wonder at the
prodigy’s own tendency to fix on the mystical to explain himself to himself.
He is certainly no less likely than the relatives, professors, and audiences
he amazes to suspect that his gifts are not accidental, that he has been
chosen. Not only is the prodigy not immune to claims of reincarnation,
astrology, and other otherworldly realms, he might actually be more acutely
attuned to them. And why shouldn’t the prodigy be given pause by his own
implausibility? Why shouldn’t he be puzzled by the puzzle he poses? As
Professor Feldman writes, “History and evolution seem to have given the
prodigy privileged access to some of our more demanding symbol systems and
allowed them to master some of our most complex domains. Is it not possible
that other extraordinary capabilities and sensibilities might be part of the
package as well?” Thus we may have to alter the manner of our marveling at
him. Maybe when Adam thrashes in his bath because of Kristallnacht he
is remembering not a conversation between his grandparents in the kitchen
but the actual smashing of the glass. Perhaps when Randy awakens from his
nap and starts spouting spiritual aphorisms, he is not inventing a testament
but channeling the dead.

One day the prodigies
will receive invitations to an international conference devoted to assessing
the destinies of the innately favored. Ex-prodigies will gather to share
drinks and compare accomplishments. One-time owners of photographic memories
will stand cheek by jowl with bygone microbiologists and spent cellists.
Some will have continued to gain altitude from the promontories they were
born upon; others will have subsided into the same standard fates as
everyone else whom PBS never bothered to feature in any special. They will
be gainfully if not garishly employed. They will learn what has always been
common knowledge among the commoners, which is that even among the
excessively blessed, things get more ambiguous the older you get.

Let us not forget that
child prodigies are children no matter how prodigious they seem. They need
bucking up and looking after. We are duty-bound to tell them to practice,
certainly, but it is also up to us to tell them to finish their
cereal, use the potty, go out and play.

“Have fun!” we cry as
they take off for who knows where. “But don’t go too far.”

Files marked
with an asterisk can be downloaded in an Adobe Acrobat Reader PDF
file. To download it, right-click the "Download PDF" link.
In the pop-up menu that appears, select Save Target As, (or Save
File As)and then save
the document to a folder on your own computer, where you can open it and
read it or print it at your leisure. Adobe Acrobat Reader software is
free and can be obtained here: